Demonstrations and protests over unemployment and poor living conditions have been ongoing in Tunisia since the beginning of December, but last week the Tunisian government turned up the heat on bloggers, activists, and dissidents by launching a JavaScript injection attack that siphoned off the usernames and passwords of Tunsians logging in to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. The Tunisian government has used these stolen credentials to log in to Tunisians’ email and Facebook accounts, presumably downloading their messages, emails, and social graphs for further analysis, and then deleting the accounts entirely.

Thank you to all of the Electronic Frontier Foundation supporters who were able to make a contribution this past year. Truly your donations, advocacy, and steadfast moral support have helped make EFF the formidable organization that it is today. We have come a long way from our first victory in Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service to our most recent major win over bogus copyright infringement claims in Universal Music Group v. Augusto, and our work continues. In case you missed it, take a look at EFF's year-end video for an 8-bit recap of just a few major accomplishments in 2010.

Since late November, the whistleblower website Wikileaks has been in the process of releasing in waves over 250,000 leaked United States diplomatic cables. Known as "Cablegate," this is the largest publication of confidential documents by any organization. (Catch up on Wikileaks developments by reviewing EFF’s page on this issue).

Wikileaks’ disclosures have caused tremendous controversy, with critics of Wikileaks claiming the leaks of classified information could endanger lives and harm international diplomacy. Others have commended Wikileaks, pointing to a long history of over-classification and a lack of transparency by the United States government.

In another example of using patents to stiflerather than promoteinnovation, a company called FlightPrep has come out fighting, threatening online flight planning sites with its newly obtained patent, and going so far as to sue at least one of those sites. That patent, originally filed in 2001, allegedly covers a system for generating flight plans online, hardly a novel concept. And FlightPrep is now using its patent to attempt to extract royalty payments from small companies that have been providing such a service for yearsor put them out of business.

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we're going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting. Today, we're looking back on Trend #7, On-line Video, where we predicted:

Like the print business, the television business is being radically disrupted by the Internet. The disparate and powerful industries affected — telco, cable, satellite, ISP, software, and production — are engaged in a battle for dominance. But as big business dukes it out, consumer rights risk being left behind. [...]

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we're going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting. Today, we're looking back on Trend #12, Web Browser Privacy, where we predicted the following:

In the late 1990s, when the conventions for the modern web browser were being determined, certain expectations were established for web browser privacy. Users who wished to take extra measures to protect their privacy could simply choose to de-activate or limit their browser's use of cookies. This would protect them from most of the worst online tracking practices.

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we're going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting. Today, we're looking back on Trend #3, Global Internet Censorship, where we predicted the following:

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we're going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting. Today, we're looking back on Trend #11, fair use of trademarks, where we predicted the following:

Parody and mockery have long been favorite tools for online political expression and activism. But the powerful entities being mocked sometimes lack a sense of humor about the situation. Increasingly, they're turning to trademark law to badger would-be jokers into silence.